Icebreakers
by kendrathomas
Summary: A collection of Nate/Kensi stories based on The Icebreaker Questions. Some funny, some sad, some romantic, some just friendship.
1. Chapter 1

Title: Icebreakers

Author: kendrathomas

Fandom: NCIS:LA

Pairing: Nate/Kensi

Rating: Blanket Rated T, but some chapters are a lot less sometimes a little bit more.

Genre: General, but some romantic parts.

Warnings: Language, no more as of yet.

Summary: A collection of stories inspired by "The Icebreakers Challenge" featuring Nate and Kensi, sometimes as friends, sometimes as a romantic pairing. Most of the stories are standalone, but I might make a few two-parters.

Author's Note: The Icebreakers are a series of questions that you ask someone to better get to know them, often at team-building activities, or with new co-workers or classmates. The list usually has ten or twenty questions, but there are lots more to chose from and I don't follow the order, I just pick the ones that I can work in with these characters.


	2. Chapter 2

**1) Love or money? High salary or job satisfaction? **

Psychology hadn't been Nate's first choice, that's for sure. He'd dabbled in the "hard" sciences and had the collection of degrees and formidable dissecting skills to prove it. Ultimately, just like his mother had told him, the reality of having bills to pay and everything costing far more than it was probably worth set in, and he'd chosen the living over the passion.

Which wasn't to say he didn't occasionally come back to them.

The guys hadn't caught on, but Kensi, the office's newest recruit, had. She was four weeks in and ever the abused newbie. While Nate knew the hazing was normal,he hardly considered the team's actions so. The last straw had been Agent Renko tossing her street clothes into the office washer, effectively shrinking them down two sizes and forcing her to ride home dressed like a hooker on the bus.

So Nate had her in his office, paranoid and angry, just about ready to smash Nate's coffee mug in his face. She hated the fact that just because the other were maybe a little better than she was (they had _years _more experience) she was at their mercy. Being the new _girl _didn't mean she'd left her skillset at home.

"You're gonna say...some_ fucking psychobabble_ about how as a woman, it's that much harder for them to accept me as an equal. Please, dude, I can kick the SEAL's ass if you pay me enough.", she told him, a no-nonsense tone dripping into her voice.

Nate bit his bottom lip, trying not to chuckle at her display of absolutely adolescent behavior, which probably contributed _more _to why the guys didn't take her seriously than did the fact that she wore a bra.

"Aren't you? Oh come on, just say it. I don't have a problem with you, you know. I'm not going to box you up and send you to Siberia in a crate. Just get it over with so I can piss off and leave already."

He grunted noncommittally, crossing off a small cloud of point form notes in the corner of his tablet.

"What the hell? What are you doing anyway?"

Kensi reached forward and flipped the tablet in her direction.

"What is this, an episode of freakin' Numb3rs?", she asked incredulously, running her eyes over the page.

Nate's eyes rolled skyward. He was beginning to see exactly why nobody wanted to deal with this chick, and certainly had sympathy for his field agent colleagues.

"It's a _formula-_", he began.

"Yeah, to calculate the position and exact trajectory of a bullet shot through at least five separate materials, using variables to represent their possible thicknesses until you get a triangle of points it could have been shot from. It's like what they do with cell phone towers, only on paper.", she filled in.

Nate eyed her, completely speechless.

"What?"

He cleared his throat and nodded.

"Who are you doing this for anyway? I thought the surfer dork upstairs was responsible for all this Zoom-and-Enhance stuff. Wait, don't tell me, selling yourself out to the corporates? Consulting for Mythbusters?"

"No. I mean, I just created the situation. It's not a case, just a puzzle, I guess.", He told her sheepishly. "It's very...", Nate searched for the proper word "-educational. I miss these."

Kensi giggled. "You miss what? Messing around in the real world instead of in the...it's called the id, right?

The just started at each other as Nate's desktop Spiderman Clock marked two minutes.

"You didn't factor in the caliber, by the way.", Kensi chuckled, a wide grin plastered across her face. Her eyes were dancing with a rare sparkle Nate hadn't thought existed. In all honesty, he actually found her kind of sexy, the bad girl talking math on the shrink's couch.

"Oh. Right. Sorry."

Kensi threw up her hands, wincing slightly.

"Why would you say sorry? It's not like you actually blew a real case."

She cocked her head and sat back down across from him on the couch.

"Well, okay.", Kensi continued. "If you really want to get a good set of points, divide the c factor by the speed and add it to-"

Nate wrote as she spoke, pausing only to punch the numbers into his calculator.

Midway through their calculations for Point 3, he found the word he'd been looking for earlier.

_Therapeutic._

After all, who said you had to choose between love and money?


	3. Chapter 3

**2)What is your taste in music? **

Kensi never would have pegged Nate for a headbanger. She'd always sort of pegged him playlisting songs from some unknown chick on the Twilight soundtrack, or John Mayer is he wanted to go mainstream. Yet here he was, at some Wakefest free show, screaming right along with a pulsing crowd of Hot Topic obsessed high schoolers, doused in what looked like blue Gatorade, wearing nothing but a pair of lemon swim trunks.

"LA, we can't hear you!", the singer shouted into his mic, a gelled up Mohawk swaying as he strummed the beginning chords of their set on a glittering electric guitar.

The crowd cheered, signaling the beginning of a riff-fueled, anti-establishment, eardrum-murdering anthem.

Kensi had come along with a bunch of her girlfriends, all of whom had "normal" careers (they never stopped reminding her) as teachers and actresses and such. They'd loaded into Karen's new 7-seater super van, GPS'd the location of the nearest get-loose day party, and treated themselves to a morning of watching the pro wakeboarding team do flips in the water and eating nothing but strawberry sherbets on the sand. The show was free, so Alex had made them go, even though Kensi'd always been more of a country girl, making exceptions only for those infectious club remixes.

She swept over the screaming throng of people, catching a glimpse of Alex in the midst of the crowd, waving what Kensi hoped was her bandanna and not her shirt over her head. She felt oddly out of place here, dressed in a pair of light brown shorts and a light blue tank top paired with almost blindingly white flip-flops. A thin teenage boy rammed into her, spilling his cream soda slurpee down the front of her shirt.

"Oh my god. Shit, I'm sorry.", he mumbled through a mouth full of interesting piercings.

Kensi almost chuckled. What was the would coming to, when kids couldn't even apologize without swearing? Her father would have rounded him up and turned him into the nearest military school.

Instead, she shrugged, letting the boy rush back into the crowd, pulling up his super-skinny red lowriders an he went.

Kensi checked the rest of the crowd for her girls, trained eyes sweeping over a sea of unfamiliar faces. Karen and Becki were both jumping along to the chorus, Kate and Stacie had joined Alex in whatever it was that was going on at the crowd's center.

"Okay, Los Angeles! This is a song that Scrape here wrote for his Momma, and it's one of our favorites! So grab a friend or someone special, Here we GO!"

Kensi sighed. The crowd took the hype down a notch and swayed along quietly with a thin, pensive, melody.

Nate had disappeared in the mosaic of black t-shirts and colorfully-dyed hair. It would have been nice, if she could talk to him, or just watch him (even though that was kinda creepy). It would have made her feel some semblance of belonging here. Nate always did that.

He probably wouldn't have wanted to talk to her, though. This was their off time. Time to become someone else, someone normal. Nate did it right away, so why was Kensi leaning against an abandoned cooler, watching bitterly as her "friends" acted like normal women? They didn't have to worry about representing a flag when they had their shirts off in the center of a mosh pit, or the invisible ghost of the man who had forced the difference between right and wrong into her looking over their shoulders.

"Hey! I thought you hated everything that wasn't, um, Reba!"

Kensi's head whipped up. She hadn't noticed Nate break from the crowd. Maybe she'd been daydreaming. She swallowed, slipping seamlessly into the usual routine. Here was a situation she was totally prepared for.

"Please. Like you listen to anything other than Death Cab. There's a girl involved, isn't there?", she chuckled.

"I listen to good bands. And these guys are great!", Nate protested, the familiar look of slightly pained frustration all over his face. On a particularly boring, cloud-covered, day, Kensi might have found it kind of cute. Today she found it highly amusing.

"Great if you're in junior year. Like those shorts! Just because they're D&G doesn't mean you can pull them off!", she joked, brushing by his bare chest. Already, she was starting to feel a little looser.

"Kensi!", he slapped her away, making her giggle as she ducked. "Besides, I bought these at Wal-Mart."

She shut her mouth and lowered her hands. Nate didn't need to be doing this He should've been going nuts with everyone else, not looking after his insecure, prudish, co-worker. Kensi swallowed.

"I'm here with some friends, so I better go.", she told him, pushing past a group of kids chugging on what were hopefully Red Bulls, not beer. Kensi jostled for space between them, hardly minding the sharp stabs of pain traveling up her legs as her feet collided with studded combat boots. Where were they? She shut her eyes, feeling just as lost as she'd been before. What was the point of being G's natural born operator when she was an utter failure at fitting in off the clock?

"Hey, wait a sec!"

Nate followed her in, a slightly concerned look on his face. Kensi pretended to scan the crowd for Alex and Karen. She didn't need his patented brand of "I know what's wrong and here's how we fix it without pills or booze" talk. She didn't need him being caring and soft and making her all okay again. She'd never needed that.

He grabbed her shoulder.

"Hey, Kensi? Look, um, I'm trying an experiment. Well-", Nate paused, in his awkward, boyish, way.

"He said find someone special, right? The point is to do exactly what everyone tells me to for a day and see how it, um, influences my choices for the better or worse. I've got a hypothesis and all that. But can you help out?", he finished, cocking his head invitingly. Kensi could almost imagine him forcing himself to agree to the concert, the shorts, the Gatorade, everything for the sake of his art. She thought that was funny, if not quite a bit disturbing.

"I'm not that special.", she told him with a tiny grin. The whole point was for Nate to think she was joking. His Kensi Blye, of course, needed validation from no one.

"Special Agent's close enough.", Nate replied, making it sound as though his head was spinning with observations and charts and all sorts of hard, provable things.

"Okay."

He held her shoulders, guiding her in a slightly awkward dance from behind. The song was soaring into its bridge. Nate's grip tightened when a tipsy girl backed into them, purple lipstick smeared across her face, though Kensi had barely noticed.

Really, this band wasn't half bad.


	4. Chapter 4

**3) What was your first serious relationship like? **

Kensi had kicked her chair back, laughing as she gripped the phone with one hand and attempted to shove a spoonful of pasta down her mouth with the other. Nate watched her, his eyes occasionally straying from the pages of Swamp Thing.

One of her old high school friends had gotten her extension from the inter-agency phone book, and called the OSP from a pay phone in Paris. Apparently, they had quite a lot of catching up to do. Spaghetti dribbled down Kensi's shirt, causing her to bat it away with the back of her hand as she traded a story about nearly running over a deer on the highway with her mother.

Nate loved the sound of her laugh. Not the sarcastic chuckle that came with the eyeroll every time he opened his mouth, but her real laugh. It sounded girly and childish, yet somewhat endearing in a way he didn't care to map out.

"What? Oh, right. Well, I did give you my cell, right? Call when you touch down at LAX, okay?"

Nate looked up, surprised their conversation was already over. Kensi dropped the handset back in the dock and pushed the phone back to the corner of her desk, her classic no-nonsense look over her face.

"Guess who's got a date to the theater next Tuesday??"

He cocked his head, and nibbled on the bait. "You?"

Kensi nodded. "I hate musicals, Nate. I've hated them ever since my dad forced me into being a flying monkey in sixth grade."

"So, um, this isn't good?"

She shook her head and sighed, rifling through case reports and packing up her mostly uneaten lunch.

"How do you do it, anyway? Properly reject guys. Is there a psychotrick for that?", Kensi wondered aloud, inviting Nate's suggestions.

He bookmarked his page and shoved the comic between the covers of a psychology journal.

"It would depend on the person...uh, so what exactly is this guy like?"

Kensi gave her usual chuckle. "He's sweet. We dated for a couple months, before I got sent out here. Personally, I think he's got a Kensi Blye stalker-wall. Flattering, don'cha think?"

Nate cleared his throat, reaching for a Lemon flavored water on the table. "He's stalking you?"

Her eyes widened. "Good Lord, no. He's doing tech stuff for NCIS in Europe. He's harmless, Nate!", she laughed, moving from her desk to the chair across from him.

"I just think he's not exactly over his little crush on me. He's cute, but I'm not looking for anything long term."

Nate grunted. Sometimes, he hated that Kensi was the only girl on the team. It put him on the hook for everything from what she looked good in (according to her, Sam and G were dirty-minded little boys) to the dreaded conversations on relationships (Hetty was supposedly too old school). It wasn't like he'd gone to school just to deal with..._female _stuff.

But he knew something about rejection, a lot about it. A lot about having your money stolen and bricks thrown through your windows. Yup, a whole lot about rejection.

"Well? Any ideas? What the hell, Nate, I'm kind of on the desperate side here.", Kensi mock-pleaded.

_Oh, yeah. Desperate._ Nate knew about desperate. Desperate enough to key his car and set the back shed on fire in the middle of the night.

He locked eyes with Kensi and shrugged, hoping his undercover co-workers were rubbing off on him and she wasn't noticing the flash of anger in his eyes.

"Google it or something. I have stuff to get done."

With that, he gathered his books and headed up to his office.

--------

It had taken some digging. Actually, it had taken two hundred dollar bills shoved discreetly in Eric's locker, a promise to look after Hetty's overweight bulldog the next time she went out of town, and a weekend spent helping Sam clean house to surprise his wife.

By Monday, Kensi was tired and sore from being on floor duty, broke for spare spending money, and memorizing a list of Jack's favorite kibbles, all of which were only available online and featured flavors she couldn't pronounce. But she had what she wanted.

She let herself into Nate's office and pulled a chair up to his desk, dropping her purse beside her and waiting for him to notice her.

"Yes, Kensi?", he said tiredly, as though he was a kid being forced to take out the garbage.

"Yes, Nate?", she teased.

Nate threw down the files he'd he'd in his hands and aimed a "Fuck Off" look at her.

"Fine, be that way. I got some files from our resident Ninja, by the way. Lots of stuff to chew on."

Kensi dipped her hand into her purse and pulled out a thick federal jacket, leafing casually through it as she glanced at Nate between pages.

"Nineteen-ninety nine. You were in Senior Year at Ash Grove High. Let's see, someone stole four hundred dollars from you bank account and tossed your card into a lake. Then they threw a brick through your parent's window and keyed your car, which by the way, cost more than I make in half a year. Then someone set your shed on fire with your sister's favorite My Little Pony stuck inside.", she quoted from the case reports she had open in her lap.

Nate nearly jumped from his seat. "Shit, are you serious, Kensi? Nothing better to do with your clearance than-" He stopped himself. Somewhere in all of this, the pieces had clicked. He knew _exactly_ what Kensi was doing.

"Your dad filed charges...which looks like the only thing he's done other than drink and gamble.", Kensi flipped through a few more reports.

"Your ex was convicted of a list of charges long enough to make me puke, so I'm not gonna read them all. And you...just left."

She dropped the file in the chair and stood over him. "The story has a happy ending, you know."

"Really?", he stood to meet her, their huge height difference coming into play. Not that Kensi was backing down.

She nodded convincingly. The files had explained a lot to her, Nate's fear of dating, his reasonless neutrality and absolute desire to please everyone.

If nobody had a reason to love or hate you, nobody had a reason to hurt you. In theory, it made sense. But in real life, where he would take being the laughingstock of the office and let their casual little jabs just sink into him, it just made Kensi feel slightly even more sorry for Nate than she usually was.

She'd been banking on the fact that hearing the stuff up front would set of his shrink switch. That he'd compartmentalize and move on. According to the books, she was on the right track.

Kensi resisted the "You really like some some crazy-ass chicks" joke at the tip of her tongue and rounded Nate's desk.

She would have said something about that whole mess, but instead, she waited in silence. A pensive look crossed Nate's face as he studied the mess of reports on Kensi's chair.

"Look, I have theater tickets for tomorrow night, and Tom's flight got delayed. The new security, right? You busy?"


End file.
